Hello, all you lovers of great and not so great sci fi, I’m back after a not so brief absence. This year I got to fulfill an incredible dream, to visit and report from the set of Warehouse 13 in Toronto. I was lucky enough to be commissioned for a series of video features by TV.com. And I have so many wonderful stories to tell from that trip. The only complaint I have – and really I can’t complain because I made this happen – is that after visiting the beautiful sets of Franco de Cotiis I can’t ever quite look at the show again with my disbelief entirely suspended.

I was reminded of this on the way into work, running past one of the many screens in my building now showing new and classic CBS shows, including the original Star Trek series. The episode we’re currently screening is The Trouble with Tribbles. That scene where Captain Kirk sits down completely bewildered by the Tribbles bouncing out from the innards of the Enterprise is so much fun to watch. But after visiting the set of Warehouse 13, for the first time I watched it and thought ‘I wonder where the crew member was that was throwing Tribbles at Shatner, was he standing to the left or right?’ Of course this is a ridiculous question…he was perched on a ledge above…but seriously…why am I even thinking about that?

Um - who's throwing these things at me?

I’m thinking about it because the wonderful folks at SyFy gave me unprecedented access for a week to the set, crew and cast of Warehouse 13. I’ve hung out at the edge of the Umbilicus, dangling my feet over the edge while I look at Leena’s Bed and Breakfast and someone rolls past in between, carrying snacks for the crew. I’ve poked around in Artie’s office, which has to be my favorite set, and looked through the venetian blinds where a crew person’s ladder is standing on the outside. I’ve walked the aisles of the Warehouse…which really is an enormous set..and realized that it isn’t quite as infinite as it appears on TV.

I wouldn’t change a second of my trip to Toronto…I feel so incredibly lucky to have been given access to this world on my favorite SyFy show. And at the same time I think those who don’t get to go have a special gift too, they get to enjoy the stories of Myka and Pete with total suspension of disbelief. We’re both lucky really.

I’ll have more on my trip in the weeks to come, but for now here’s an outtake video from my trip, first published on TV.com…enjoy, follow me on Twitter @justinokelly_ and send me your questions about Warehouse 13!

]]>https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/peeking-behind-tvs-fourth-wall-2/feed/0justinokellySTTroubleTribWant to know who’s in ruttin’ command here?https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/want-to-know-whos-in-ruttin-command-here/
https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/want-to-know-whos-in-ruttin-command-here/#respondTue, 30 Nov 2010 04:16:02 +0000http://quarrytv.com/?p=56One of the great joys of good sci-fi is the writing. Smallville, in its last season, has tons of great examples. My favorite from season 10 so far came last week:

“I hate to interrupt the real housewives of Metropolis, but I need to understand the composition of this alloy.”

Some of my other favorites for this week:

“You know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I go get and beat you with until you understand who’s in ruttin’ command here.” – Jayne, “Firefly”

…which gives me an excuse to share some depictions of the brilliant Adam Baldwin as Jayne in Firefly. If you get any further than these pics, let me know what your favorites quotes are…

“It takes eight minutes for light to travel to the Earth from the sun… So if you wake up one morning and it’s a particularly beautiful day, you’ll know we made it.” – Capa, “Sunshine”

“Step up to red alert.” ”Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.” – Rimmer & Kryten, “Red Dwarf”

“Not something I ever expected to say on air… ‘removing the head or destroying the brain’.” – Jeremy Thompson, Sky News Anchor on Z-Day, “Shaun of the Dead”

“How can you put your faith in a man whose idea of a romantic nightspot and an impregnable fortress are the same thing? This is a pub!” – David, to Liz, “Shaun of the Dead

“What happens if they board us?” ”If they take the ship they will rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins in to their clothing, and if we’re very, very lucky, they’ll do it in that order.” – Simon and Zoe, “Firefly”

]]>https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/30/want-to-know-whos-in-ruttin-command-here/feed/0justinokellyJayne Cobb FireflyJayne Cobb in FireflyCylon demand equal rights in next Battlestar Galactica installmenthttps://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/cylon-demand-equal-rights-in-next-battlestar-galactica-installment/
https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/cylon-demand-equal-rights-in-next-battlestar-galactica-installment/#respondSun, 28 Nov 2010 20:21:10 +0000http://quarrytv.com/?p=49Hearing that a new series is due to be made in the Battlestar Galactica franchise which seems bound to castigate her kind again, the Cylon known as Number Six speaks out in a letter to Executive Producer David Eick.

“It has come to my attention that Hollywood screenwriters are attempting a third time to tell the story of my noble race. Given the way we were portrayed in the SyFy Channel’s last attempt, Caprica, I feel I must protest strongly before our reputation is damaged further.

“As you will note in Caprica, Daniel Graystone originally conceived us to do some of the manual tasks that his kind didn’t want to do. Vacuuming is no more fun on Caprica than on your puny planet, let me tell you. Currently we are being left in a rather small, dirty box as he appears to have lost interest in us. Honestly if he leaves us in there much longer, you can hardly blame us if we wake up and want to do some ‘house cleaning’ on our own terms. I believe you have an analogy on your planet if you look at Toy Story 3. Remember what happened when Andy’s Mom put a bag with Mr Potato Head and his friends out on the curb for the garbage truck?

“Cylons in the previous series, Battlestar Galactica, were terribly undervalued too. Name me another master race that can march in lines quite as straight as ours? Or one that has found a way to make fire with just a look of its eye and a swivel of its head?

“And since we’re on the subject of heat, let’s deal once and for all with this slanderous nickname that has taken hold…the toaster. We may bear a passing resemblance to the Cylon centurions from the first Human/Cylon war. But we have learned the art of applying Turtle Wax better than any of your flimsy automatic car wash machines.

“I am of course happy with the actress previously chosen to play me, Tricia Helfer. A former Elite Model recognized on four of your tiny little continents, this was the one sound decision made by the producers of that show. It was easy to believe she could beguile any human into doing what she bid, as of course we can. If only they had continued to be so wise.

“Finally I would like it to be remembered that compared to us, humans are notoriously directionally challenged. Is anyone else trying to figure out why it took them four years to find Earth? One wonders if it would have been easier with paper bags over their heads. They certainly arrived a little late to the party. For our part, with just one eye each, we are always able to detect which way these puny individuals are going to emerge from those interminably long corridors that seem to crop up on every space ship.

“There is much still to be told of our good deeds, but I fear it is unlikely to be seen in the next perversion of our story, ‘Blood and Chrome’. When will people learn of our artistic accomplishments? Does anyone even care that we were the first race to practice recycling? Our methods of reproducing are particularly unmessy. Give me five minutes in a room with the producers and I will[jo1]reduce them to a pulpy pile of bone and fleshshow them how to pay proper homage to our kind.

Yours,

Six

]]>https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/28/cylon-demand-equal-rights-in-next-battlestar-galactica-installment/feed/0justinokellycylon-sixFighting and farting about on the set of Blake’s Sevenhttps://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/fighting-and-farting-about/
https://quarrytv.wordpress.com/2010/11/25/fighting-and-farting-about/#respondThu, 25 Nov 2010 19:14:43 +0000http://quarrytv.com/?p=36

Few quarries had as much on-screen time on British sci-fi TV as Winspit, near Worth Matravers in Dorset, about an hour from where I grew up. Winspit was used until about 1940 as a stone quarry (producing high quality Purbeck stone for major buildings in London), then was the site of naval and air defences during the second world war .

But that’s not why we watched Blake’s 7 avidly when it became the planet Mecron II, or Doctor Who when it was transformed magically into the planet Skaro for ‘Destiny of the Daleks’.

The beauty of this really ordinary looking location was that you could shoot actors in enormous settings, making it feasible to arrive in exactly the same spot on a different day, point the camera a different way and christen it a new planet. Interestingly none of these planets ever saw much sunshine.

That didn’t stop producers from choosing Winspit to double up as a hot desert location for Servalan, supreme commander of the Terran Federation…

…or a barren wasteland where you find yetis apparently up-ended in the ground

Getting around these quarries wasn’t as easy as it looked. Here Del Tarrant tries to give Soolin a leg up one particularly difficult incline…

…only to split his pants a little while later. The BBC’s costume department could have done with a few more stitches there:

Guns would frequently misfire:

Transportation was frequently rather difficult…poor Soolin having another tough time here:

and as you can see by watching one of several out-takes tapes, there were many more hazards to shooting in quarries…

When I heard of the premature end of SyFy’s Caprica I groaned aloud…another wonderful science fiction series led off the cliff before it could fully sprout wings? It made me think back to other shows which have shown great promise, only to wither on the TV vine.

John Doe, which aired on Fox TV 2002-2003 still lingers in the memory, in part thanks to its star Dominic Purcell going on to greater ratings success with Prison Break. As we all know by now, in the latter show he shaved his head and grabbed every opportunity to take his shirt off.

The opening credits of John Doe recall the opening scene of the pilot – a naked man wakes up on an island off the coast of Seattle. Dominic Purcell, naked. That was enough to keep me watching every episode, though of course he never followed through by finding anyone else naked on the island.

Still want to know the story? ‘John Doe’ has no memory of how he got to this forest or who he is, but can access all of human knowledge. He knows how many dimples are on a golf ball, he knows the population of Morocco. He probably doesn’t know why Colin, way back in my ninth grade math class would never look at me with anything but a sneer, despite the fact I was subliminally telling him he was the most gorgeous kid alive.

‘John Doe’ had everything a gay sci-fi fan could want:

A sexy lead star who never totally settled into dating any particular girl

A tendency to linger moodily at his local bar when the going got tough

A cool apartment and car, which he seemed never to have to earn any money to pay for

A penchant for taking in and helping stray dogs – in his case people in need whom he could help with his gargantuan brain

…and one further thing many gay men would identify with:

The ultimate cop-out to making any sort of relationship commitment: “Sorry; you can ogle me but we would never work as a couple, I’m still searching for myself. Really.”

I mourned John Doe, its never-ending plot possibilities and its spooky theme tune, for quite a while. But I like to think somewhere in lost-TV-showland, John is still searching for himself, having just opened up emotionally enough to accept a trusty British sidekick.

You may wonder why my first post is about a show that wasn’t ever filmed in a quarry. The island near Seattle is the metaphor for a quarry in this show. Don’t be so literal.

Which shows have you mourned and what do you think their heroes would be doing now?

I first fell in love with QuarryTV watching the original Star Trek at the age of 7 or 8. Part of me had fallen in love with William Shatner in his tight black trousers and tunic. But the other part had fallen in love with the mysterious worlds he visited, often resembling a disused quarry, where anything was possible.

You could save your own planet here, find love, conquer enemies, try out new technologies for the first time. Most of all you could escape. I’ve been escaping to this quarry in its different forms ever since. And now I’m writing about the land I call QuarryTV, where every great and not so great science fiction show is eventually filmed. Sometimes theses shows aren’t filmed in a quarry but they still offer a great escape.

I wrote my first post while escaping online with free wifi on Virgin America, thousands of feet in the air. Who knew that would ever be possible?